Autumnal Awe

The leaves along the creek have turned a bright lemon yellow and the breeze shakes them from the trees like falling snow. I sometimes forget how much I love the fall. Perhaps because I grew up in a largely coniferous forest the thrill of autumn colours was not ingrained in me like my love of the sweetly warm and fragrant summers of the west coast, and the rare and precious snowfalls that sparkled for a few days, sometimes just hours. Sacred seasons of warm green and diamond white, with flowers and a little orange dabbed here and there on the rainy shoulders of the year, subtler to me somehow. Not until Denmark did I experience the thrill of a deciduous forest lighting up in colours so bright against the dark blue of a fall sky, your breath catches. I was not accustomed to such glory. To be shocked by such beauty left me slightly dazed, and does even now when I think of it. But I still never expect fall splendour and so when it comes I am dazzled beyond words and I go around with my mouth open and cliches upon my lips and my camera poised to try to capture a golden, burning, rusty riot of colour upon the arms of the gentlest living beings, until they softly shed their glorious cloaks and stand naked for months as frost covers their refuse thick up in the ground. Oh the beauty of trees! And the sigh of the wind through their branches. But fall is also the creek winding through the soft carpeted forest floor, and the sun still warm where it shines, and the cool shadow, and the song of the birds, and the brilliance of the stars as the nights grow colder. I love it. What words could ever capture such majesty and such mystery as this living breathing earth. As a living breathing part of this planet I am obsessed with it, and sometimes wish we could live forever, together with our loved ones upon this wild and breathtaking earth. We have our season like the leaves, like the trees. We must live, and love, with just as much colour.

March of the Sugar Ants

Seeing the ants march
Four by four
Twelve by twelve
An army
A river
A stream of chocolate
Melting in the sun
It can make you pause

Pause like a warm breeze
Ruffling the pages of a book
Look up
Look down
A moment
A sacred moment
Nothing but the patter of leaves in the breeze
and a river of chocolate brown ants

Ants melt into estuaries
Into raging seas
The pavement turns brown
Heaving leaves
The waves swallow us up
A turbid cloud enshrouds our eyes
A flickering moment
A dream?
Neat concrete lines
Neat ant armies
Neat piles of brown leaves
Back in place

The deep sea within
Rages up
Rages down
Outside the leaves
Are turning brown
The colour of every paint
Blended carelessly on the palette
Toothless urges for change
The wind will take them
Where they must go

Shadows lengthen
New and unknown shapes
Heads of many faces
Worry settles in
My constant companion
Cinches the space
Between my brows
As if frowning
Will change anything
As if a tight jaw and a distracted mind
Ever made the world a better place

The leaves smell sweet and dry
Crunch on the sidewalk
The ants go marching
Through the cracks
And up garden walls
With purpose
Such enviable purpose

I kick leaves up
I kick leaves down
So many situations
That I can do nothing about
The ants are marching
The leaves are brittle husks
White is the sky
Sweet blue just out of sight
Masked by a veil of ivory cloud

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